“Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken,
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.“
–John Prine “Paradise”

Paging Tim DeChristopher.

Today the Dept. of Interior announced
that they’d be making coal-rich tracts of lands available to the mining
industry in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Leasing bids worth somewhere
between $13.4 billion and $21.3 billion and producing 758 million tons
of coal.